1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to data perturbation for wafer inspection or metrology setup.
2. Description of the Related Art
The following description and examples are not admitted to be prior art by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Inspection processes are used at various steps during a semiconductor manufacturing process to detect defects on wafers to promote higher yield in the manufacturing process and thus higher profits. Inspection has always been an important part of fabricating semiconductor devices. However, as the dimensions of semiconductor devices decrease, inspection becomes even more important to the successful manufacture of acceptable semiconductor devices because smaller defects can cause the devices to fail.
Currently, methods for generating recipes that can pass tool matching specifications are empirical. For example, a recipe may be created on the first tool (“Tool 1”) and then tried on the second tool (“Tool 2”). If the recipe does not pass the tool matching specifications on Tool 2, it is modified and brought over to Tool 1 and tested. If the modified recipe does not pass tool matching specifications, then this process is performed back and forth from one tool to the other iteratively until the recipe settings lead to tool matching results. This process gets even more complicated when three or more tools are involved. As such, setting up matching recipes in this manner can take a significant amount of wafer time, tool time, and engineering time.
Accordingly, it would be advantageous to develop methods and systems for determining one or more parameters for wafer inspection and/or metrology that do not have one or more disadvantages of the above-described methods.